ViGiLO - Din l-Art Ħelwa
ISSUE 57 • MARCH 2022
13
A COPY OF A STATUE IN ROME The ‘Bambin ta’ Praga’ or ‘ta’Aracoeli’ in the Oratory of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Valletta By Mark Agius To celebrate the centenary of the Confraternity of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the artefacts of its Oratory are being restored.
I
n all Carmelite churches, there is a devotion to the Child Jesus under the title of the ‘Bambin ta’ Praga’—the Holy Child of Prague. The Oratory of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Valletta is no exception. Since the present writer was a little boy, he would be taken by his mother to visit the Child Jesus in the Oratory, and he was taught the story of the Holy Child of Prague. All the local community knew this Baby Jesus as the Bambin ta’ Praga. Silver ex voto and war medals were offered to it, and were displayed in its niche. My mother, a Carmelite tertiary, wrote to Faversham in England, where a Child of Prague shrine exists, to get some literature about the story for me.
But in fact a careful iconographic examination of this Child Jesus in the Oratory shows that it is not in fact a Bambin ta’ Praga, but a copy of an equally famous child Jesus of Aracoeli in Rome, which is a Franciscan devotion. It is worth recounting the story of the Holy Child of Prague, since there is an important connection with the Knights of Malta. The Holy Child of Prague is a sixteenth-century waxcoated wooden statue of the Child Jesus holding a globus cruciger of Spanish origin, surmounted by a Maltese Cross, which is in the Discalced Carmelites Church of Our Lady of Victory in Malá Strana, Prague.1 It first appeared in 1556, and pious legends claim that the statue once belonged to Teresa of Ávila, who gave it as a wedding present to a Spanish noblewoman, Maria Maximiliana Manrique de Lara y Mendoza, who married the Imperial High Chancellor of Bohemia, Vratislav of Pernstein. She gave the statue to
